On the first page of Isabel Allende's latest novel, narrator Aurcra del Valle warns the reader: “This is a long story, and it begins before my birth; it requires patience in the telling and even more in the listening. If I lose the thread along the way, don't despair, because you can count on picking it up a few pages further on.” The promised “few pages” expand to nearly 100, though, before Aurora finally tells of her birth—marked by the death of her mother, Lynn Sommers, and abandonment by her father, Matias del Valle.

Aurora's maternal grandparents, Eliza Sommers and Tao Chi'en, care for her in San Francisco until the grandfather is murdered. From the age of five she is raised in Chile by her widowed paternal grandmother, the indomitable businesswoman Paulina del Valle, who is determined to keep her from discovering her complicated origins. Meanwhile, Aurora is haunted by a recurring nightmare that has her holding the hand of someone whose face she cannot see when they are menaced by children dressed in black pajamas, a pool of blood gathers on the ground, and she loses the grip of that friendly hand.

No one can or will explain those unsettling images that often leave Aurora in paralyzing fear. But she suspects they are somehow linked to her history, so uncovering her mysterious past becomes a vital mission.

Allende has made the crucial mistake, however, of allowing her narrator to reveal in the first third of the novel too much of what she will eventually discover. Consequently, when Aurora spends the next 200 pages searching for the details of her past, it is difficult to remain sufficiently engaged by the quest because you already know the outcome. Allende does manage to leave until the end the explanation for her nightmares, but attentive readers will not be surprised by it either, particularly if they are familiar with the other parts of what the publisher says is a trilogy.

In terms of the period covered, Portrait in Sepia fits between the author's two most successful previous works—The House of the Spirits (1987), her monumental first novel, which casts its narrative gaze across a large part of the 20th century, and Daughter of Fortune (1999), which takes place in the mid-19th century. The new book, describing the years from 1860 to 1910, is peopled and practically overwhelmed by characters introduced earlier. Eliza Sommers, Tao Chi'en and Paulina del Valle appeared initially in Daughter of Fortune; Severo and Nívia del Valle, the parents of the mystical matriarch Clara, are from The House of the Spirits. All are powerful, busy figures who found clinics, establish vineyards, go to war, or stow away on a ship to follow a vanished lover.

The introspective Aurora is simply no match for them. A wallflower in her own narrative, she is too often reduced to observing the dramas of others, or recounting long past adventures she has heard about. Since much of this novel concerns events far from Aurora's own experience, she is frequently unable to capture their vibrancy. One notable exception is Severo's experiences in Chile's War of the Pacific, which she portrays with a harrowing immediacy:

As the Chilean artillery pounded the town with cannon fire, leaving ruin and twisted iron where once there had been a peaceful holiday resort, Severo lay in the patio of the hospital, along with hundreds of mutilated corpses and thousands of wounded abandoned in puddles and besieged by flies, waiting for death or to be saved by a miracle.

Whatever powers of observation Aurora does possess she attributes to her mentor in photography. Don Juan Ribero. This gruff Santiago master is able to teach even after he goes blind. His students “take turns describing what they've seen: a landscape, a scene, a face, an effect of light. They have to learn to observe very closely in order to endure Don Juan Ribero's exhaustive interrogation. As a result their lives change; they can't any longer wander through the world in their old casual way because they have to see with the maestro's eyes.”

From her apprenticeship Aurora develops her own sense of vision. Through her camera she examines “familiar objects with new eyes, as if seeing them for the first time, without taking anything for granted.” Unfortunately, Allende does not allow the reader to experience this transformation, does not limn a single moment of insight that would help us better understand Aurora's inner life.

The rather straightforward historical realism of Portrait in Sepia puts it in a different literary universe than The House of the Spirits, with its expert channeling of Gabriel García Márquez' brand of magic realism. To be sure, Latin American writers before García Márquez wrote books that combined the authorial omniscience and grand sweep of a 19th-century novel with the surrealism of the early 20th century (most notably Miguel Ángel Asturias, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1967). Yet it took García Márquez' ability to describe the fantastic in his masterly deadpan voice with eerie understatement, to establish magic realism as a recognized international literary style. Standing beside his towering masterwork, One Hundred Years of Solitude, but by no means entirely in its shade, are Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children and Allende's The House of the Spirits.

That magic realism was more an early influence than a personal language for Allende is readily apparent in her subsequent novels. Each makes progressively less use of ghosts, inexplicable occurrences and a casual reordering of reality. One may therefore ask, after shedding the influence of García Márquez what is Allende left with?

The answer is, quite a lot. There remains, of course, her talent for painting a panorama, whether it is San Francisco's Chinatown (“the clocks obey no rules, and at that hour the market, the cart traffic; the woeful barking of caged dogs awaiting the butcher's cleaver, were beginning to heat up”) or a battle in the Andes (“guerrillas hid on snowy peaks, in caves and gullies, on windswept heights that only they, men of the sierra, could survive. The Chilean troops' eardrums burst and bled, they fainted from lack of oxygen, and they froze in the icy gorges”). Then there is her swift, canny take on character: “Paulina always moved deliberately, for she considered that nothing made one as unattractive as haste.”

As for Allende's real subject, her inspiration, it is what she speaks of in Daughter of Fortune as her characters' “rage hidden beneath good breeding.” This is the author's rage as well at the social conventions that trap women—and men—in constricted lives. Her greatest sympathies lie with those who refuse a fate of reduced expectations. In Daughter Eliza Sommers flees the invisibility an illegitimate child could expect in Chile, and during California's gold rush falls in love with and marries a Chinese healer, Tao Chi'en. In The House of the Spirits Blanca Trueba pursues a longtime affair with activist Pedro Tercero, against her landowner father's wishes.

A similar struggle makes Portrait in Sepia come alive. Aurora's tale of the early years of her marriage to the oddly distant Diego Domínguez is a moving, painful account of a husband and wife who have not been able to forge intimate bonds: “Pretending to be asleep, I would press myself against his back and interlace my legs with his; in that way I sometimes bridged the abyss that was deepening between us. In those rare embraces I was not seeking pleasure, since I didn't know that was possible, only consolation and companionship. For a few hours I lived the illusion of having recaptured him, but then dawn would come, and everything would again be as it always was.” Here we find genuine feeling and immediacy; Aurora is finally at the center of her story, and the drama is hers and hers alone. When she searches family photographs she has taken for clues to the reasons for her husband's coldness, Aurora's new powers of sight help transform her life, and Portrait in Sepia finally catches the fire in its author's heart.

Reading Allende's trilogy in the order of its composition, we see a writer who relies increasingly on formula. Formidable parental figures, love at first sight, illegitimate birth, and mansions that expand over the years with a kind of architectural improvisation recur throughout these works. This almost obsessive echoing of subject matter can be said to illustrate the cyclical nature of history. Certainly the political oppression Aurora describes in Chile's 1890s Civil War is a chilling prophecy of the terror that would consume that country in the 1970s—so strongly depicted in The House of the Spirits. But because Allende has covered this material before, she is not always able to make it seem fresh.

Portrait in Sepia has been described too aptly by the publisher as a bridge that completes the author's trilogy. Regrettably, the bridge does little more than connect two far more substantial works. Perhaps Allende should follow the example of her favorite characters and seek out new territory that might revive her protean imagination.